If your inner critic is screaming…
I recommend you listen.
When I was a kid, I wrote anything and everything. To look at the volume of diaries and word documents I’ve got piled in my closet and in the ether, that must be close to the truth. I wrote for writing’s sake. I wrote to fill the text boxes I delighted in creating. I wrote to try out new fonts and color combos. I wrote to profess my love, my hate, my fears. I was not scared of writing. I was a writer. There was no subtext, just text. Loads of it.
But when I rounded the corner of adulthood, I’d sit down to write and sometimes, I would have a peanut gallery. My own little private pair of Statler and Waldorf, perched on my desk, telling me I was not Shakespeare or James Joyce or Dante. This was true and also somewhat obvious. The subtext was also not the subtlest. You’re not good enough. People will laugh at you.
“The voice in my head - which sometimes spoke to me in Italian - had a not-so-subtle message: You’re not good enough.”
When I was in academia, the voice (which had dried out and sharpened up after all those hours in the seminar room) told me somebody had already said it before. (Sometimes it even spoke to me in Italian, which felt all the more despairing.) Also that every single sentence wanted a footnote, and every footnote deserved a chapter, every chapter needed to be a book, and how could I ever possibly finish this book? You don’t belong, the voice was telling me. Basic imposter syndrome.
Now that I’m a mother and an entrepreneur, my voice is singing a different tune. It’s a-okay for me to write, as long as someone is paying me to do it. Write for me? In my free time? Not right now. Do some paid work first. Do some housework second. Writing can come third. Third’s a solid place to finish, right? Better than honorable mention. What’s the message today? You don’t deserve to do something for yourself. You’re not enough.
In college, grad school and academia, I gave that voice a lot of air-time. I definitely got my work done, because I loved the things I studied and at heart I was always a writer. But I did it careening through my days and weeks with a feeling of out-sprinting a hippo.
In the six years since I began my climb out of the ivory tower, I’ve done a good amount of therapy and I’ve read a lot about the human mind. I’ve learned about limiting beliefs and how they’re an evolutionary hold-over that form during our early childhood in order to help us survive threats, real and perceived. And I’ve learned which ones I have; I could string them up like Christmas lights above a dorm room common area, if I ever got the chance to go back to college. Now I know that when I sit down to write, my limiting beliefs will make an appearance, sometimes the moment I plop into my chair, sometimes they’ll give me a little runway before they make an entrance.
I know they’re coming and I’m ready for them. I try not to swat them away or shoot them side-eye, but instead offer them gratitude – a practice I’ve learned from my childhood best friend. Thanks for looking out for me. Thanks for keeping me safe. Thanks for working so hard. I’ve got this.
It’s a practice. Sometimes it's a dialogue, and sometimes it’s a screaming match, and sometimes I definitely listen to the voice and give up the writing and go and do the thing they’re needling me to do. But more and more, I sit down and write my way through it. That’s where the space gets opened up for the writer that I was as a child, a writer. Full stop, no subtext.
“It’s a practice. Sometimes it’s a dialogue and sometimes it’s a screaming match. But if you listen without judgment - even for a moment - you might just open up that space where your true creativity lies.”
So when you sit down to write and feel yourself magnetically repelled from the keyboard or wanting to drop your pen like it’s a red-hot poker, before you throw yourself into whatever alternate activity that will make the voice pipe down a little, take a minute to listen to what it’s saying. It might take a few back and forths before you get to the nugget of truth. Your voice might be saying to check your email, sweep under the bed, eat a cookie, comb through the job listings - but if you stay in conversation for a bit longer than you might want to, you’ll get the insight: Why you feel you can’t write. Not why you can’t write, why you feel that way.
Once you get the insight, you sit with it. It might irritate you today, but try to offer it gratitude. When you start to do it authentically, the voice will know. It’ll eat up that gratitude like my kids devouring a gelato in an Italian piazza (also me, I also devour gelato in Italian piazzas). See what happens. When my inner voice starts feeding on gratitude, it tends to let me say what I want to say.
